We announced the acquisition of SimpleGeo at the end of October 2011. Since then we’ve been evaluating how to proceed in a way that benefits all parties involved: SimpleGeo and Urban Airship customers plus both companies. After many internal conversations and discussions with a variety of clients, we've come up with a new direction. To summarize that approach, here's the email we sent out today to all SimpleGeo customers to let them know about our plans since the merger:

Dear Customer:

As you know, this past October, Urban Airship and SimpleGeo merged to combine mobile customer engagement with location and context-based services. Since then, we've maintained the status quo with respect to SimpleGeo’s products: Places, Context, and Storage. In the meantime, the newly combined team here has been busy speaking with customers about what services they would find most useful to deploy from the combined entity.

As a result, during the first half of this year we will introduce significant new features to Urban Airship’s high performance push notification services that allow our customers to take advantage of location and context to better segment and engage their mobile audience. As just one example, customers will have the ability to send push notifications to users on specific device types, in specific geographical areas, during specific time frames, e.g., iPad users who have been in the SOMA neighborhood of San Francisco within the past 7 days. The ability to fine-tune audience segmentation for push notifications will increase relevancy to users, provide new app capabilities which will lead to higher customer engagement and satisfaction rates, and deliver increased return on investment. We’ll share more with you in the coming weeks and months as we can.

In order to deliver on this aggressive vision in the shortest amount of time possible, we need to focus our product development efforts. So, after lots of internal discussion and customer conversations, we will wind down the availability of the current versions of Places, Context, and Storage over the next few months. We will do everything we can to minimize the impact to customers as we look to end the availability of these services on March 31, 2012. For more details on this change, see our FAQ document.

We have already lined up a partnership with Factual to provide continuity for all customers using the Places service. The folks at Factual are on standby to ensure as seamless a hand-off as possible to their services. We also have an additional list of replacement services in a migration path document on our support site. In addition, we will not be charging for usage of any of the Places, Context, or Storage services for their remaining availability period or for past usage to date, as a thank-you for your patience and understanding during this transition.

Because we want to continue our relationship with every SimpleGeo customer, we are offering existing customers of the SimpleGeo services up to six months of our Urban Airship Pro Plan for no monthly charge (see the offer details in the FAQ document).

We are extremely excited about the future of adding location and context into our mobile customer engagement products. We look forward to working with all of our customers to help them innovate with these new capabilities to make their mobile initiatives even more successful.